


Tell Me Where It Hurts

by 1001cranes



Category: Stoker (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Female Protagonist, Female-Centric, Incest, Uncle-Niece Relationship, Uncle/Niece Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:34:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2169585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whip doesn’t like nice girls, but anyone who thinks India Stoker is a nice girl is only fooling themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Where It Hurts

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS RO'S FAULT

> Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
> 
> -Margaret Atwood
> 
>  
> 
>  

Whip doesn't like nice girls, but anyone who thinks India Stoker is a nice girl is only fooling themselves.

Sure, she's quiet, and polite to teachers. She's real smart when you make her speak up in class. And she might dress like a librarian from the 1950s, and she might live in a big mansion in the nice part of town, but she's got the flat, dim eyes of a predator - and how no one sees that  _baffles_ him. Plenty of people think India's weird, but they don't have the kind of weird right. If india's a nice girl, Whip is a nice boy, and, well...anyone could tell you that's not true.

| |

She finds him in the woods one day. Anyone else, he'd say its a chance meeting, but India? There's something way too spooky about her for that.

He's smoking pot in a little copse not far from where his bike is parked. He grins at her. 

"Hey India," he says. "Want some?" 

"No, thank you," she says, like he asked her to fucking tea. And she hiked up her skirt - knee length, floral, ugly as those fucking saddle shoes she always wears - and settles in his lap. 

He's so surprised he drops his goddamn joint. 

| |

"I see you," he tells her. It's about the point in time he should be saying her name, or telling her how beautiful she is or how good she's making him feel, but India's got her legs clenched so tightly around him he can barely breathe. Nothing left for lies. "I see you," he says, and when she comes its loud enough to scare birds out of the trees.

| |

"You can't tell anyone about this," she says afterwards, buttoning her shirt and straightening her skirt.

Whip laughs. "You think anyone would believe me?" He's still hanging out of his jeans, untucked. He has a few regular cigarettes in his jacket pocket, and he plans on smoking them before heading off to work. "About you?"

"Boys believe all sort of things about girls," she says, and he supposes that's plenty true. It would maybe even work better because its him. 

"What's another secret?" he asks, but she's already disappearing back into the woods.

 

 

 

ii.

When India turns eight her father begins to take her hunting. India is very, very good at it. Her father fills his study with their kills, and they keep the local taxidermist busy even in the off-season.

They leave before dawn, when everything is quiet and dim. When they come back, hours later, the world is alive and buzzing and India's mother is just getting out of bed. 

"Mrs. McGarrick has brunch waiting in the dining room," Evelyn says. "Did you bring back something for dinner?"

"Rabbit!" India tells her proudly, because she is still young enough to want her mother's approval, to look for it in the small places. She hasn't yet realized she's not the daughter her mother always dreamed of. She is as a changeling to Evelyn, a human girl with the Stoker name and a face that is deceptively easy to love. But India does not want to wear pretty clothes, or go shopping. She never wanted a pony. India has no friends to invite on sleepovers, to make cookies with in ruffled aprons. She will never want to gossip about boys.

India hoists the brace of rabbits as if to put them on the table, and her mother sighs.

"How lovely," Evelyn says. "Why don't you take them into the kitchen and let Mrs. McGarrick deal with them?"

India takes them into the kitchen, but she guts and skins the rabbits herself, under Mrs. McGarrick's watchful eye. The heads go to rubbish heap in the garden, but India saves the feet for luck.

| |

The summer India turns ten, her growing pains get so bad her cries echo in every corner of the house.

"She's like a little animal!" her mother complains. "Wailing and screaming and throwing herself about. How is anyone supposed to get any sleep?"

"She's in  _pain_ ," her father says. He's the one who brings her heating pads and massages her legs and strokes her hair. India already loves her father more, but this is the first time she realizes it.

| |

When India is twelve, she gets her first period. She knows it is about to happen before she knows  _what_ is to happen - her stomach feels cramped and nauseous, and her scent changes.  When it arrives, she smells the blood before she sees it, and the dank red-brown in her underwear does not disturb her. She goes to public school, and spends her rainy days steadily going through the many volumes in the library. This is her menses. Menarche. Her period. 

"The Mescalero Apaches have an eight-day celebration for all the girls who have menstruated in the past year," she tells her father. "They believe its a time of life where you become aware of all the things around you."

"India," he says, exasperated. 

"It's a rite of passage in most cultures," she tells him. "In America, its mostly considered private. Taboo."

"You don't want to talk about this with your mother?" he asks. 

India shrugs. "I already took some of her tampons." She prefers them to pads, she knows that already. The smell doesn't disappear, of course, but it's more contained. It certainly feels a little easier to move.

Her father sighs. "When you get home, tell Mrs. McGarrick so she knows."

| |

India is fourteen the first time she tries to masturbate. She knows that many cultures considering menarche the start of womanhood; biologically, it is likely possible for her to carry a child, even though both the process and outcome disgusts her. She can barely stand brushing up against other students in the halls - the idea of having intercourse raises goosebumps all over her body. The idea of having a child is as alien.

She reads first. The library is her refuge on the days her mother will not let her play outside, and the information contained therein sometimes serves her understanding of the world outside.  All of the human parts, at least.

The anatomy books are both illuminating and obfuscating. There are the names for the parts - the labia minora, the labia majora, the clitoris, the urethra, the perineum, the anus - but they skip from sexual differentiation to reproduction, with very little in the way of mechanics; India is uninterested in any partners besides.

She explores herself. The folds, the little hood, the catches of skin. They smell unlike fish, despite what the boys in the back of the bus would say. Closer to ammonia, or regular sweat, the clean and aromatic scent that builds under her arms when she runs around in the summer sun, as unique to a person as a fingerprint, as far as India can tell.

She touches her clitoris softly, deftly, and it makes her legs jerk unpleasantly. It hurts to push harder, it does nothing to push her fingers inside of herself, slick or not. Her nipples harden when she touches them, but they don't seem particularly sensitive. She doesn't particularly  _like_  it. It isn't often India feels out of step with her body - it feels, sometimes, like the only refuge she will ever have - but her sexuality, and her expression of it, eludes her. 

"You're restless today," her father says, and India makes a face, the corners of her mouth turning down. 

"I'm having trouble concentrating."

"What's wrong?"

India shrugs. "I don't know." Hormones, she supposes. "Not exactly. Do you remember when I had growing pains?"

Her father huffs out a laugh. "I'm fairly certain no one in the house will ever forget that." 

"It feels like that. I can't tell where it hurts, only that it does."

"Well," her father says. "Hard to come up with a solution when you don't know the problem."

| |

When India is sixteen her hormones begin to make life difficult. She catalogues the changes in herself: the swelling breasts, tender to the touch; the inexplicable crankiness, even with her father; the urge to rub herself against things when she wakes. Sometimes she eats everything and sometimes she eats nothing, and sometimes only one particular food will do. The boys are school seem louder and more pungent then usual; the girls more shrill, cattier. 

"I don't like boys," she says one day, peevishly. Her father, already still, lying in wait for their prey, becomes a statue. "Or girls either. I just want --" She doesn't know what she wants, exactly. She never wanted to put much of an effort into even thinking about it, if she's honest. She finds most ideas flat out unexciting. 

"Not everyone feels sexual attraction," her father says, after a moment. He seems to be choosing his words carefully. "And you're only sixteen, India. You don't need to have it all figured out yet. The important thing is to... not be ashamed of what you need. Not to let it control  _you_."

"Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop yourself from doing something worse," India quotes obediently. It was their de facto family motto. 

Her father relaxes, infinitesimally. "Exactly. Yes." He pauses again. "Let me know if you - if you do find someone who interests you. So you can be safe.

India raises an eyebrow.

"And - never mention this to your mother. She wouldn't understand."

India nods. Some days it seemed as though India's mother was as alien a thing as one of the animals they had stuffed in the library. As bright-eyed, as decoratively lifeless.

| |

When India is eighteen, her father dies, and she meets her Uncle Charlie.

 

 

 

iii.

Chris tries to attack her after school, without any of his boys for witnesses, without anyone to stop him from doing something stupid. 

He doesn't even get a hand on her. She sidesteps him, and he takes a punch to the face and a punch to the gut, hard and precise. He ends up flat on his back, head spinning. 

She wipes the floor with him.

"There are better ways to get my attention," she says, and she's not even winded, fuck.

"Fuck you," he spits out, immensely self-satisfied when some of the blood in his mouth flecks her face. He bucks so hard when one of her hands, fine and pale and long-fingered, grasps the front of his jeans he almost throws her off.

He comes buried inside her, her arm like an iron bar against his throat. There's a line of bruises later, clustered under his Adam's apple, and he can't breathe without thinking of her.

 

 

 

iv.

In the right light, Charlie looks like India's father. If you look closer he seems a little too thin, too slim, his face underformed. He is Richard Stoker fifteen years ago, twenty, when he was young and boyish, when he met Evelyn Drake on vacation in the south of France and fell in love.

In the right light, Charlie looks like India. Their eyes are the same unblinking mirrors, their hair the same shade, the same straw consistency. Their skin is pale with freckles, their bones thin and light, their movements lithe and a shade too fast. They have an unnatural and magnetic grace. It draws people towards them or it pushes them away, but no one is unmoved. 

"We are not responsible for what we have come to be," India says. She is lying next to Charlie in their new apartment in New York. It is expensive in a way that screams old money, masculine and rough hewn, leather and dark wood and large windows. It has her father's stamp all over it.

"We are not formed by ourselves alone," Charlie murmurs back. He and India have decided they are newlyweds, that the New York will be their home base. They're debating where to go next - Charlie favors Cambodia, but India has been told there is nothing like Paris in the spring.

"Are we going to do bad things, or worse ones?" India asks, but not aloud, not aloud.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Crawford O'Brien, Suzanne J. (2005). [American Indian religious traditions: an encyclopedia, Volume 2.](http://books.google.com/books?id=SEopBoB8ch0C&pg=PA279&dq=Mescalero+Apaches+menarche&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Mescalero%20Apaches%20menarche&f=false), by way of the great Wikipedia. 


End file.
